Chapter 199: Private Qingteng High School The Thirteenth Person (Patreon)

"Thirteen beds..."

The giant Russian named Ivan repeated the number under his breath, and his guard shot up.

The players dropped all pretense and began eyeing one another openly.

Every gaze raked across the others, hunting for the inhuman thing that might be hiding among them.

Once the seed of suspicion is planted, it never goes away.

An NPC or the Ghost slipping into the group disguised as a player was a classic setup in certain high-difficulty dungeons.

A mole like that was often more terrifying than any monster in the dungeon, because it would stab you in the back at the most critical moment.

Ivan's gaze finally settled on Frank, the man who had been cowering ever since they entered the dungeon.

Frank had survived the earlier attack, but his nerves were clearly shattered. He sat hugging his knees at the foot of a bed.

"Hey, you."

Ivan clenched a fist the size of a clay pot and strode toward Frank. "You've been acting shady from the start. What the hell are you?"

Frank scrambled backward in terror, babbling, "I'm not! I'm a player! This is my third dungeon! My name's Frank!"

"Who knows if that's true!" Ivan grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him off the ground.

"Enough!" Lin snapped coldly, stopping Ivan.

"Infighting is the stupidest thing we could do right now. Until we have proof, every one of us is a suspect."

Shido Makoto quietly put on his glasses.

The effect of [Glasses] activated. Through them, every low-level illusion and disguise would be laid bare.

He swept his gaze over everyone in the dormitory.

Lin, Ivan, Mitsuhashi, Yukino...

None of them showed any abnormality.

That didn't completely clear them, though.

Perhaps the mole's disguise was of a high enough grade to slip past the Glasses' detection range.

Shido Makoto said nothing. He took the glasses off and kept the information to himself.

While the atmosphere in the dormitory hung at a standstill, Yukino did something unexpected.

She walked straight over to the bed marked 13.

Something seemed to be wedged in the gap in the bed boards.

Yukino reached out and carefully pulled a wad of paper from the crack.

It was a crumpled test paper. When she smoothed it open, most of the writing had blurred beyond reading.

But the margins were covered in vicious doodles: stick figures stabbed with knives, stick figures hanged. Beside them, in red pen, were scrawled words like "Die," "Worthless," and "Disappear."

The moment she saw the doodles, Yukino's pupils contracted sharply.

She connected them with the scratches she had seen earlier on the classroom desk, and a guess slowly took shape in her mind.

Holding the test paper, she walked into the middle of the group.

"I think we may have been looking in the wrong direction."

Her voice instantly drew everyone's attention.

Yukino held the paper out for them to see. "Look at this, and think about those carvings in the classroom. There's very likely a hidden storyline about school bullying behind all this."

"School bullying?" Lin frowned.

"Yes."

"Think about it. To a student who's been isolated and bullied by the whole class, his existence is as good as having disappeared in everyone else's eyes, isn't it?"

"That's why there's no seat for him in the classroom. As far as everyone's concerned, he doesn't exist."

"But objectively, he does exist. So in the dormitory, which represents private space, he has a bed. The thirteenth bed."

Yukino's analysis left everyone stunned, and a chill crept up every spine at once.

If the inference was right, what role did this bullied student play in the dungeon? Ally? Or enemy?

Lin gave Yukino an appreciative look. This woman with the codename "Tabby" had not only sharp powers of observation but clear logic as well.

Yet as Yukino laid out her deduction, the fingers hanging at her side trembled slightly.

She was remembering her own past: the days of being shunned, the indoor shoes that had been hidden, the malicious stares.

Beep—

An electronic clock on the wall suddenly sounded. The display read 21:55.

Five minutes until lights out.

At the same time, rows of blood-red writing began to surface on the blank wooden board behind the dormitory door, just as it had on the blackboard earlier.

Dormitory Rules

Shido Makoto's gaze swept over them first, and he committed every clause to his memory palace at lightning speed.

[Rule 1: After lights out, making any sound is strictly forbidden.]

[Rule 2: After lights out, leaving your bed is strictly forbidden.]

[Rule 3: ...]

Mark, who had lost an arm in the earlier chaos, was hunched in a corner, bandaging the wound haphazardly with strips of cloth.

He had lost too much blood, and his face was deathly pale.

Everyone climbed into bed while there was still time.

Just then.

"Ding-a-ling-ling-ling—"

The lights-out bell rang through the entire dormitory building without warning!

Click.

The dormitory plunged into absolute darkness, so thick they couldn't see their own hands.

Every sound vanished in that instant.

In the silence, a sudden "tap-tap-tap" came from the ceiling, like a few glass marbles rolling across the floor.

Then it stopped.

From the direction of Bed 13 came a bone-chilling sound of chewing!

Crunch... crunch...

[After lights out, making any sound is strictly forbidden.]

[After lights out, leaving your bed is strictly forbidden.]

With those two rules in effect, no one dared move or make a sound.

Everyone held their breath and lay on their own beds, not daring even to turn over.

The chewing went on, slicing at everyone's nerves bit by bit.

Shido Makoto lay in bed with his senses heightened to the extreme.

In the dark, he could clearly hear the breathing of every player around him and feel their fear.

Using a special breathing technique, he had even forced his own heartbeat down to an extremely slow rhythm.

He knew very well that in a rule-based horror setting like this, the slightest disturbance could trigger an annihilation condition.

That chewing was a probe.

Whoever cracked under the pressure first, whoever showed a flaw first, would die.

Yukino lay in the bed next to Shido Makoto's.

The darkness amplified every sense, and the chewing seemed to be right beside her ear.

The smell of rust had grown even stronger.

She bit down on her lip, using the pain to force herself to stay calm.

Just as she felt her nerves about to snap, she suddenly heard breathing from the next bed.

It was extremely steady and long, as if an ordinary person lay there sleeping peacefully.

It was Shido Makoto's breathing.

That inhuman steadiness, in this setting, acted like a sedative. Her wildly pounding heart settled, for reasons she couldn't explain.

Time slowly passed.

Suddenly.

Clang!

Junho, the Korean player, jerked in his nervous state and accidentally knocked over the tin cup he'd left on the headboard shelf.

The cup hit the floor.

The chewing stopped dead.

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